House appropriators have reservations — or worse — about proposed CISA cuts

House appropriators on Tuesday challenged proposed budget cuts for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, with Democrats saying the Trump administration was disturbingly moving money away from the agency and a key Republican saying he needed to see justifications for the reductions.

The Trump administration has proposed cutting CISA funding by $491 million, and some members of a House Appropriations subcommittee raised doubts about that idea during testimony from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Specific details for those budget cuts weren’t released in the so-called “skinny budget” last week.

Homeland Security subcommittee chair Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., said that at a time when leading Hill voices and others are saying China is getting the better of the United States in cyberspace and as CISA personnel cuts are already underway, appropriators need more information on the budget proposal.

“What is the plan?” he asked at the end of the hearing. “When somebody says, ‘Hey, you guys presided over cutting half a billion dollars to do other stuff, what was that based on?’ We don’t want to be in the position of, and won’t be in the position of, ‘That’s what they said we needed.’ We need some building blocks. What’s the plan for us to be kicking China’s butt, and how we’re still OK on that civilian sector stuff?”

The top Democrat on Amodei’s panel, Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill., decried DHS for “moving money away from CISA,” as she said to Noem.

“Last week you said we should ‘just wait’ for the president’s grand cyber plan,” Underwood said. “But you have not waited to erode the department’s cyber defense capabilities by removing resources and personnel from CISA and other components.” 

Noem said the president’s cyber plan would be “coming out shortly and that’s the president’s prerogative.”

Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, said the DHS proposal was “overfunding some efforts, mainly for messaging purposes,” and “at the expense” of programs like cybersecurity. He went further, saying the budget “ignores and even attacks other functions of DHS,” among them CISA.

Noem maintained that instead of “censorship,” CISA is “back to securing our critical infrastructure.” While past CISA officials have denied all allegations of engaging in censorship, any amount of work it did on countering election misinformation and disinformation had largely fallen to the wayside under the Biden administration, and at best, the overall election security work was reported to be a miniscule part of the agency budget.

In her written testimony, Noem said the agency has “dramatically increased our cyber operations to prevent threats and address vulnerabilities within the Federal Government,” but she didn’t elaborate nor was she questioned about what she meant.